The partnership
Cybersecurity, telecommunications and artificial intelligence are fields of intense international competition — for scientific results, for industrial capability and for talent. They are also fields where sovereignty is at stake, and where no single institution can carry the effort alone.
That is why the DGA, the Brittany Region, ANSSI and 12 public higher education and research institutions founded CREACH LABS in 2014. The partnership pools recognised academic expertise, the engineering capability of DGA.MI and the Region's long-standing support for strategic sectors, to reach a scale that matters on the European stage.
What makes CREACH LABS unusual is not that it funds research — it is that it connects research to operational engineering. DGA.MI, the reference expert of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces in cybersecurity, telecommunications and electronic warfare, continuously produces open questions as a by-product of its engineering work. Turning those questions into research topics, and returning results to the people who need them, is the core of the partnership.
The partnership covers four closely related fields:
- Cybersecurity — cryptography, embedded-systems security, hardware security, binary and code analysis, formal methods, intrusion detection, privacy.
- Telecommunications and networks — signal processing, antennas, propagation and electromagnetic coupling, network protocols and services, physical-layer security.
- Electronic warfare — in liaison with the above, where the interfaces are among the most promising and least explored.
- Artificial intelligence — with AMIAD as the Ministry's reference expert, covering both AI for defence applications and the security of AI itself.
The interfaces between these fields are deliberately part of the scope: they carry strong scientific and operational value and remain, for the most part, under-explored.
Governance
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The Steering Committee comprises 16 members — 15 representatives of the partner institutions and one of the Pôle d'Excellence Cyber — and meets once a year. It frames collaborative activities, oversees scientific and financial performance, and sets strategic guidance on scientific priorities and recruitment.
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The Scientific Council is made up in equal parts of representatives of the partner laboratories and of the DGA. It establishes the scientific priorities that guide project selection, awards the CREACH LABS label to projects, and reviews the annual reports and activity programmes — ensuring both scientific quality and relevance to State needs.
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The Executive Board has three appointed members. It implements the decisions of the two other bodies, secures the funding of approved projects, monitors the progress of labelled projects and organises the meetings.
Resources and results
- 900 researchers and engineers in Brittany work in these fields across the partnership, roughly one third in academic laboratories and two thirds within DGA.MI — an estimate, but one that conveys a concentration of skills with few equivalents.
- €2.5 million per year invested in research projects on average, and close to €12 million committed between 2020 and 2025.
- 97 projects funded between 2020 and 2025: 63 PhD projects and 34 postdoctoral or research-engineer contracts.
- A shared network of high-security technical platforms (LHS), supported by CREACH LABS and the CPER, so that theoretical work can be validated experimentally.
How we work
- Annual calls for proposals funding PhD projects and postdoctoral or research-engineer contracts, assessed and ranked by the Scientific Council.
- DGA researchers hosted within academic laboratories, under association agreements. This is the most original mechanism of the partnership, and the most effective: a shared bench does more for a collaboration than any convention.
- Joint seminars, thematic semesters and conference series, which keep the scientific communities in contact throughout the year.
- Thematic working groups, one per scientific theme, where academic partners and State institutions build a shared view of priorities.
An ecosystem
CREACH LABS operates within a particularly dynamic ecosystem, structured nationally by the Pôle d'Excellence Cyber and regionally by Bretagne Cyber Alliance, alongside major industrial players — Thales, Airbus, Sopra Steria, Orange — and some 170 SMEs. Cybersecurity is a pillar of the Region's smart specialisation strategy (S3), and defence an axis of its regional strategy for economic and social transitions.